The Musings Of Jeff Chandler

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Is Tumblr Dead?

Tumblr, the service that makes publishing to your blog a breeze seems to be showing signs that the service is dead. Granted, there have been no official announcements and the following is only my opinion based on observations that anyone can make. Upon visiting the official blog for Tumblr, the last post to be published – Tumbling Towards 2.0 was back on April 27, 2007.

The post goes on to describe the development of Tumblr 2.0 and what to look forward to. Since today is August 28th, many Tumblr users are beginning to scratch their heads, wondering what is going on. Take a look at the comments on their last blog entry and you’ll see users are already starting to ask if Tumblr is dead.

No one seems to know where Tumblr is heading. Wouldn’t that be interesting if Tumblr, tumbled into it’s own demise? As I said, it’s not for certain if the service is dead or not but all of the signs I’ve seen point to that observation. What do you think? Am I just blowing smoke?

*UPDATE* It would appear as though I’m not the only one who has brought this subject up within the past few days. Amit published a post a few days ago where Marco, a Tumblr team member responded to his post with the following comment:

Tumblr and Davidville are both doing great and we’re hard at work on Tumblr’s next release. We’ll have something to say on the blog when it’s ready, I’m sure.

This is not the Tumblr forum – it’s my personal site. Official Tumblr news will never be posted here.

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16 thoughts on “Is Tumblr Dead?”

Jeff you might be right. I sent them an email with a few questions a week ago and nothing back, at all. The other thing is that they were regularly posting in the month of March then bugger all.

However in saying that, you don’t roll out new features to the point that they did and then close up shop. The other thing is that they might be discussing selling the service – things tend to go quiet during these periods. Or they might be truly that busy they don’t have time.

The thing with a lot of these start-ups is that they need to work as well as maintain the service due to the fact that they run on a show-string budget. Maybe they are revenue generating?

However, if you have comments along the lines of “hello” and “anyone out there” and “is Tumblr dying” – I would be onto that quick smart.

So big questions Jeff you raise some points worth considering. Wait and see I guess. Oh did you track back to the blog entry – that might get their attention as well :) Cause I’d like to know as well!!

I have to agree with the author of this post. Tumblr is dying and I don’t want to be trapped inside it when it finally grinds to a halt.

Apart from the increasingly frequent outage (I monitor it using Pingdom), feeds regularly die as well, the only explanation being “there is a problem with this feed”. The latter now increasingly applies to the basic lifestream feeds set up by Tumblr.

I am inclined to take Marco’s announcement that he (“we”, who’s we?) is (are) “working hard on the next major update” with a pinch of salt: experience shows that if you’re working seriously on update a web product, you will quite naturally communicate regularly with your user base. This is both to keep them loyal AND because if you’re working and the result is not yet ready to share, you’ll want to show that you haven’t been idle.

With a combination of a WordPress-based tumblelog and lifestream feed derived from one of the increasingly numerous lifestream feed sites becoming available, migrating away from Tumblr would be a relatively trivial issue if it weren’t for the fact that the export API (surprise, surprise) doesn’t work (for me at any rate).

I never did get into Tumblr. I signed up, but never used the service, mainly because I liked Jaiku and Vox much better. I still do use Vox.

Just isn’t innovative anymore. I know a couple of developers who are developing blogs for people to post on, and they don’t even rival the likes of Vox or even a WordPress.com blog, and it makes me question what they were thinking.

I occasionally use tumblr if I come across something that isn’t suitable for my blog, or if I come across an interesting quote. I love coming across cool quotes. Based on what I’ve read though, blog services such as Tumblr will probably become more common, as blogging becomes more mainstream. It’s a shame that they just can’t post a HELLO, WERE ALIVE, you know?

Although I rarely post directly in my tumblog most of my stuff ends up there, because I use it as a scrapbook of my online presence: blogs, photos, shared links, etc. Every time I tried to contact Tumblr I got no response, including a few ones after the 2.0 upgrade. I’m starting to feel like the “safety net” is missing, and the lack of a community (official forum/ wiki) behind all this doesn’t help at all…

That is exactly why I don’t mess with it. There is no real sense of community. I just recently started a WordPress.com blog, and at least there I know I can attract people from the WordPress.com to view my stuff.

If Tumblr integrated some amazing social functions and features—it would be amazing.